My view on Tabletop Games, home of the JTRPodcast

Gameday First Play – T.I.M.E Stories (Spoiler Free)

Go back in time and inhabit the body of someone to prevent a disaster…

Quantum Leap: The Board game

The T.I.M.E Agency protects humanity by preventing temporal faults and paradoxes from threatening the fabric of our universe. As temporal agents, you and your team will be sent into the bodies of beings from different worlds or realities to successfully complete the missions given to you. Failure is impossible, as you will be able to go back in time as many times as required.

This will be spoiler free so I won’t mention anything that isn’t in the rulebook…

The first thing I noticed when I opened the VERY white box is how VERY white everything is. The second thing I noticed was a message on the back of the sealed pack of cards that says “Do not open until you have read the rulebook” on the back.

Don’t ignore this, it’s very important.

So the basics of game play are as follows…

You will be given a few cards to give the background of the story you will be going in to. You are also given a receptacle, or character card of the body you will inhabit as well as a number of Time Units (TU’s) you will have to spend during the game.

You’re given a plan view map of the area you’re in and you get told where to start. You set up a deck of item cards in numerical order and put the other cards aside.

The area you’re told to start in will reveal a panorama with several different areas.

Location panorama blurred for your pleasure. The rest of the picture is slightly blurry because I’m terrible with a camera 🙂 Party Rings not included in the base game.

Each player puts their big chunky token over the location card they want to look at. When you look at the back there are several things that can happen such as you get to take an item and it’ll give you the item number. Maybe you get a bit of story, or you see a picture of something or meet someone etc. Trying to be generic s not to give anything away.

In these cases you can only show people at the same location card as you what you see, you have to describe it to everyone else. By describe I mean describe, not read the card out.

In the game you, as players, are telepathically linked so imagine how you’d describe something you see to everyone in your group. Do that.

Some locations involve challenges based on your receptacles stats which involve dice rolls and some have a padlock that mean you can’t leave the location until you win (or lose).

Challenges are based on shield tokens put in play and you roll dice, successes eliminate shields, skulls rolled on the dice may trigger bad things.

Some locations are locked and have a certain symbol on the back of card. You can enter these locations once you have that matching symbol token that you can get in a variety of ways.

Taking actions in locations costs a TU, as does moving to a different location. You roll a dice to determine the random number of TU’s lost when changing location.

If you go to 0 TU’s you lose and you read out a little story. Win and you read another card (although I haven’t read that one yet).

If you fail you reset the game (except some item cards you can carry forward, these are generally items that give you knowledge of something, not something physical you can carry. After all, the world has reset, not your memory) and go again until you win.

I LOVE this GAME. (It is a game, just a different take on it but it’s more than an activity and the “Game” part I enjoy) It’s like Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective but you don’t mind failing.

In Sherlock, each scenario can only be played once and you need to be as efficient as possible to get the most points. But if you’re too efficient to the point of not doing enough you ‘fail’ and ruin that scenario for yourself…

Here, you can take all the time you have (literally) to do whatever you want, sometimes with hilarious consequences. Eventually the ‘Path to Victory’ to will be clear and you can get to the end. (I assume, I haven’t won a scenario yet :))

I didn’t know it until I played it, but this is the game I’ve been waiting for for long time. Also, with a Scenario every 3 months I’ll hopefully get plenty of enjoyment out of this system for quite some time.